Attendance policies take responsibility away from students

There are many regulations and programs on the Emporia State campus that are designed to help freshmen adjust to college life and become successful students. For example, the majority of students are required to live in the residence halls for the duration of their freshman year of college.

In addition, students are required to purchase a campus meal plan which includes a minimum amount of meals and must abide by certain rules outlined within their housing contract.

All of these are measures taken by the university to help ensure that students make a smooth transition into college life. However, there is one step, left to the discretion of each individual professor, which may be overdoing it just a bit.

Attendance policies may make perfect sense in a high school setting, where the state requires a student to attend a certain amount of school days in order to obtain their diploma. The same is not required by the state of a college student, and perhaps it shouldn’t be required of a professor either.

It’s not difficult to understand that an attendance policy may help a freshman student acclimate to the hectic environment that college can sometimes become. However, it can also be said that a freshman student must learn to be responsible for their own education if they have any hope of actually succeeding.

The second problem with this practice is that it affects more than just freshman students. Sure, encouraging class attendance is a productive thought. But in practice, it’s more of an unfair stipulation, especially when placed on upperclassmen who understand the potential consequences of skipping too many classes.

After all, isn’t it the potential consequences that compose the reasoning for the attendance policy concept? Yet students aren’t held responsible for their own actions to the point that would help them to understand consequence. If a student fails a class for not showing up, it should be because they missed too much of the material covered and were not able to catch up, not because a professor decided that a student cannot pass after missing a certain number of days.

In addition, many professors set attendance and tardy policies by which they themselves do not abide. Why is it that a professor can decide how many absences a student is allowed, but is left with the freedom to cancel class whenever they wish? This hardly seems like a logical distribution of power considering who pays the tuition around here.

The reality is that if a student is able to do well in a class after missing half of the semester, then that is one brilliant student. Either way, college is a time when young adults set the patterns by which they will behave for the rest of their lives, and students should be made to take that responsibility seriously on their own. If they cannot, perhaps they don’t belong in college in the first place.